What Ruby taught me

I've been studying Ruby for a couple of months. In the last month, I started working with Ruby on Rails projects. It was a huge transition for a former C# programmer.

Write tests. Then write more of them! Repeat.

Rubyists love tests. If you want to build consistent and trustable applications, test them. In the last weeks, I've been writing tests before I start writing my classes. There are awesome gems such as RSpec, Capybara and FactoryBot that can make this job easier.

Make it work, then make it pretty.

This one is dangerous! When I was working with other languages, I was too much worried about architecture, objects relationship and all the superpowers object oriented programming gives you.Working with Ruby in the last month, I figured that I must write a class that works, spending more time writing what really matters. Then I can think about the other stuff, if it still makes sense at all.

Ruby community is awesome!

If you are stuck or need help with Ruby, be sure that there's a whole community ready for battle. Study groups, meetups, talks, confs, forums and so on. You can find one here.

Feels just like plain English.

Ruby code feels like English. You can barely tell it's machine language.

This code explains itself. It reads like English. This is all about code readability. There's a couple chapters about it on the book Clean Code, a must-read for programmers hard-skills improvement.

“Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand.” — Martin Fowler

It's being a fantastic experience to learn a programming language that's been teaching me so much as a software developer 🚀

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